The disclosure relates generally to information technology, and more particularly to mapping memory pages used for direct memory address (DMA) transfers between memory and input/output (I/O) devices in a virtualized computer system.
The term “virtualization” may refer to different aspects of computing. In one aspect, hardware virtualization generally refers to methods that allow multiple applications to run concurrently on a computer. Hardware virtualization may be implemented by a hypervisor, which may also be referred to as a virtual machine manager. In another aspect, virtual memory refers to techniques in which virtual addresses are mapped to actual (physical) addresses in the memory of a computer system. With virtual addressing mechanisms, applications are able to address more memory than is physically available in the main memory of the system. In addition, application programming is simplified as applications are not required to manage memory that is shared with other applications.